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So how's everyone's entries coming along?

I'm especially excited about Morgan's. I noticed that the last time she did anything storygame related on the site, it was rating a quiz game about zombies, two years ago. That can only mean she's been building up to something AMAZING all this time, and what better opportunity than a contest like this to unleash it on us?

Malk said he was joining my "SJW contest."

I'm guessing if he's serious, he'll write about prehistoric lesbians or something.

I'm just not sure if I can compete with Vaguely Creepy Ambiguous Necrophilia as a theme. (You know you don't actually have to rate storygames after you've played them, right?)

More to the point, I've been waffling between three ideas, and probably don't have time to finish any of them. Maybe the monstergirl dating sim, if I pare it down to the absolute minimum...

Why wouldn't you rate a story after you've already gone through the trouble of reading it? It's just one click, and then you get a point. You care about points, anyone snooping through your EXP page can see that. You collected the daily points, daily.

Your claim is clearly ridiculous and I'm not sure why you'd tell such a blatant and obvious lie, but wow it really does call into question everything else you've ever said on this site, or any other.

Well anyhow, the month is half over so don't waffle for too much longer. I'd really hate to win by default again. I admit this monster girl dating game sounds intriguing, have you considered taking money from children to fund its creation, and then disappearing, forever? Good luck!

Since you haven't yet given me the opening I wanted, let me just flat out state to the site as a whole that Seth is confirmed alive as recently as the 7th. So finally, we can all make fun of his failed Kickstarter and the fact that he removed all reference to it from his profile now. Let's get some good jokes in before something else happens and he dies for real.

I saw that, it was pretty strange to see him without that profile picture. 

Sorry, I mean successful Kickstarter. He sure did accomplish taking a lot of money from people.

Will those people ever even be compensated at all? 

Nope. This is why you don't Kickstart anyone without a proven track record in game development and a reputation to lose.

I did offer to just outright donate money but he was sulking about Kiel at the time so never responded to me. Though to be fair he'd already left the site, then came back only to ask for money and didn't bother to thank Taco for her Bad Art Charity Lemonade Stand either.

Last comment on that kickstarter I think was in May this year and no responses from Seth since December 2016.

Why would I be lying? I don't play a ton of games, but I do play some -- most recently Delve!, and some incredibly bad POV-switching Get Raped in Generic Fantasyland thing. And Vaguely Creepy Ambiguous Necrophilia, of course.

One of those three would have been an easy rating, if I were still collecting points. The other two, not so much. I wasn't super into Delve, but it's obviously a serious feat of scripting, and it wasn't bad for what it was... just not really to my taste. How do I assign a numerical value to that? And your game was well-written, but I thought it had structural/pacing issues, and the theme left me cold... no pun intended. Again, what does that actually add up to? Yes, I could make some more-or-arbitrary decisions about how to weight those factors, and come up with a number -- did that for a bunch of IFComp entries this year. But it's not "just a click," and it wasn't something I always found to be worth doing even when I was collecting points.

I'm pretty sure it hasn't actually been "forever" yet. :P

 

>you don't actually have to rate storygames after you've played them

why do you even have an account

1) Telling people to leave while they still can.

2) Starting 400-post threads on gender.

 

Seriously, it's like you're not even paying attention. 9_9

Rating storygames is a rather beneficial thing to do site-wise. Once a storygame hits a hundred, it becomes ranked. Plus, the writer would appreciate it if the readers showed some manner of like/dislike of one's storygame. How else can we improve without feedback?

smash a keyboard every day and eventually the Hamlet will be written

I'm pretty sure that the authors of most of the games I've played here wouldn't actually want the score they'd get from me. And while a numerical score is feedback of a sort, I'm not sure it's especially helpful. Seeing that my combat test game averaged out to a 5/8 didn't actually give me any clues for how to do combat better, it just confirmed that my instincts were correct, and what I had wasn't working that well.

Yeah no one posts stories here looking for ratings or feedback, you're probably right. I'm not sure why that review box even exists tbh, some archaic quirk of the site from ten years ago I guess but it serves no purpose now.

I'm sure they'd all like ratings and feedback... as long the rating is above a five and the feedback doesn't amount to "you should probably take this down and make significant revisions."

Well I'd give you some good feedback if I'd known you even had a storygame...you can always ask, too.

Aw, thanks! I took it down a while back, though. And to be clear, I did get good feedback at the time, my point was just that the number itself wasn't especially helpful. Real feedback can obviously be incredibly helpful, but when it is, it's because you've got more work to do. And most people don't want to hear that about a piece they consider to be finished.

Ratings and reviews and the entire ranking system are just as much for the benefit of other readers as for the author.

I thought I was clearly lying and nobody would do anything as ridiculous as play games without rating them? Why are you now trying to convince me to rate games that you don't think I'm playing in the first place? 

Well I tend to go over different aspects that I thought were excellent or needed work. I don't only criticize. 

That's a good approach, and I'm sure people appreciate it.

Ummm... what? If you think a storygame I write is a 4/8, then rate it that way please. If I only received the highest ratings, then I'd think I write better than I really do. The 5/8 ratings tells you that it's pretty good with some flaws. Read the comments if you want more specific things. Additionally, the ratings are for all people to see, so I know that Eternal is better than something written by a ten year old with a glance. One of the major reasons I'm on here is to improve my abilities as a writer, and I can't really do that without feedback from both comments and ratings.

Congratulations, you're one of the exceptions to "most." Which gives you a much better chance of actually improving over time, so again, kudos.

nobody wants a 1/8 but I still hand them out without mercy because I could get to the end within a few minutes. Even when my ratings had a bunch of weight as Ford I'd pretty much solely hand out 1's and 2's because most games are peoples' first and they suck and they should know.

I was grinding shitty short 1-worthy games for the points for a while, back before the WC ban happened. Eventually decided it wasn't worth it. :P

Same except I decided it was worth it lol